Friday, 31 October 2008

I was getting bored of this weblog's template. After all, I've been using it since I created it so it was time for a change. I decided to go with Blogger's standard TicTac Blue as it was designed by one of my favourite web designers, Can Cederholm of SimpleBits fame. Of course, I'll probably end up customising it.

Thursday, 30 October 2008

Canonical released Ubuntu 8.10, code named Intrepid Ibex today. So obviously, I felt like I had to upgrade my Hardy Heron (8.04) T42 tonight, especially considering that Canonical have advertised this release as focused on the desktop and mobile computing so should be ideal for a laptop. As usual with recent Ubuntu releases, once the 1466 files my upgrade needed were downloaded, the rest of the process was a breeze and I am now writing this on a newly upgraded machine. Well done to Canonical for making it easy and idiot proof. So here are my first impressions, in no particular order:

The Gnome theme is slightly more streamlined and looks good.

I was expecting OpenOffice.org to be updated to v3.0 but that wasn't the case and Intrepid keeps v2.4. Hopefully, an upgrade to 3.0 will be available later.

There is a new Create a USB startup disk option in the System, Administration menu. I'll have to try that out!

There's a Recent Documents sub-menu in the Places menu. This will definitely come in useful.

The Shutdown button that used to open a dialog box box has been replaced with a drop down menu that includes a Guest session option: makes it easy to lend your machine for a few hours to a friend without being worried about your files or having to set up a special account.

Everything else looks like Hardy but I'm sure I'll discover new changes as I use the machine more.